Diverse chemical products find a wide variety of uses such as in drug discovery, genetic studies, and the like. Exemplary of the diverse chemical products that are useful in scientific studies are peptides, oligonucleotides, and other related materials.
The synthesis of diverse chemical products has often created difficulties, however. For example, it is often desirable to synthesize diverse collections of molecules on a plurality of solid supports such as beads. Examples of the use of beads with diverse molecular products synthesized thereon are disclosed in, for example, the following applications, incorporated herein by reference for all purposes: U.S. application Ser. No. 07/876,792, filed on Apr. 29, 1992; U.S. application Ser. No. 07/762,522, filed on Sep. 18, 1991, now abandoned, U.S. application Ser. No. 07/946,239, filed on Sep. 16, 1992; and U.S. application Ser. No. 08/146,886, filed on the same day as the present application (Attorney Docket No. 11509-121/1007.2).
While meeting with substantial success, the techniques described above have also met with certain limitations. For example, when the synthesis of diverse products takes place on beads, many manual manipulations of such beads becomes necessary. For example, in U.S. application Ser. No. 07/876,792, filed on Apr. 29, 1992, incorporated by reference herein for all purposes, one must suspend a collection of beads in a carrier, divide the beads, perform monomer addition reactions on the divided sets of beads, sometimes redivide and selectively recombine the beads thus synthesized, mix the recombined beads, and repeat the process. When large numbers of monomers are involved and when the reactions involve many monomer addition steps, manual techniques become extremely tedious. In addition, the "accounting" for the many products that have been synthesized becomes a daunting task.
From the above, it is seen that improved techniques of synthesizing diverse chemical products on beads or other similar substrates are desired.